Skip to main content

Love till morning


Last Christmas I gave you my heart But the very next day you gave it away This year, to save me from tears I'll give it to someone special

Wham! sang those lines in 1980s. They wouldn’t sing it today. No one wants to give their heart anymore to anyone, it seems. Maybe, there’s no heart anymore.

Situationship has become a regular word in English. 

Relationship is a burden today. Why endure the stress and strain caused by such commitments? Love the skin, enjoy the sex, and say goodbye when you are tired of it. You can have multiple partners too. The New Indian Express tells me [18 Dec 2022] that there many types of relationships (situationships?) among the youth today.  Cookie jar relationship, for example, refers to dating multiple people before deciding who will be better for you even if it is for a few days. Keeping one on the hook because either one of the partners is not ready to commit even for a few days is called benching. Roaching is when you hide from your partner that you have many such partners. There could be more.

The writer of the above Express article claims that this kind of relationships has an advantage: “Allows companions intimacy without commitment.” I wonder whether that is really possible. Can we have any meaningful relationship with another person without some commitment? I feel tremendous commitment even towards my cats! Can you love without commitment?

Well, I guess I belong to another generation altogether. Sometimes when I deal with the young nowadays, I feel that I don’t belong to this galaxy at all.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 431: Last Christmas I gave you my heart But the very next day you gave it away... Weave a story or write post on the brevity / superficiality of relationships nowadays. #Relationship

 

 

 

Comments

  1. JaiDecember 21, 2022 at 8:02 AM

    You are absolutely right, Tom. Even I cannot imagine any intimacy without any commitment in the relationship or situationship or whatever. I guess we have become too old to understand the kind of things the younger generations come up with. On the other hand maybe the younger generations are too young to understand the value of a relationship with true commitment.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 21, 2022 at 9:26 AM

      I'm absolutely convinced that i have become a kind of scarecrow among the young generation 😊

      Delete
  2. Rajeev MoothedathDecember 21, 2022 at 2:18 PM

    An interesting piece...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yamini MacLeanDecember 21, 2022 at 4:58 PM

    Hari Om
    What is being discussed is the difference between lust and Love. Far too often the former is taken as being the latter. The freedoms of today are a treasure, for sure... but with freedom comes the responsbility of avoiding licentiousness. That requires engaging one's intellect... not that often to the fore when hormones are raging! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 21, 2022 at 6:55 PM

      True, it's lust vs love and the youngsters are failing to draw the necessary line.

      Delete
  4. parwatisingariDecember 22, 2022 at 11:02 AM

    Tomichan you nailed it again. unfortunately the word intimacy was not understood either us, or the generation before us, intimacy is not about sex... it is about feeling safe in a relationship. Essentially kids are so bubble wrapped that they don't know intimacy. forget with another, they are not comfortable with themselves either.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 22, 2022 at 1:10 PM

      Most of my students loved their Covid masks. When the air became safe enough to remove the mask, these students didn't. I asked whether they feared the virus or themselves more. Most were honest to tell me that they kept the mask as a self-defense mechanism. So, you're right, they are not comfortable with themselves and that leads a lot of problems.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
28 comments
Read more

Abdullah’s Religion

O Abdulla Renowned Malayalam movie actor Mohanlal recently offered special prayers for Mammootty, another equally renowned actor of Kerala. The ritual was performed at Sabarimala temple, one of the supreme Hindu pilgrimage centres in Kerala. No one in Kerala found anything wrong in Mohanlal, a Hindu, praying for Mammootty, a Muslim, to a Hindu deity. Malayalis were concerned about Mammootty’s wellbeing and were relieved to know that the actor wasn’t suffering from anything as serious as it appeared. Except O Abdulla. Who is this Abdulla? I had never heard of him until he created an unsavoury controversy about a Hindu praying for a Muslim. This man’s Facebook profile describes him as: “Former Professor Islahiaya, Media Critic, Ex-Interpreter of Indian Ambassador, Founder Member MADHYAMAM.” He has 108K followers on FB. As I was reading Malayalam weekly this morning, I came to know that this Abdulla is a former member of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind Kerala , a fundamentalist organisation. ...
10 comments
Read more

Empuraan and Ramayana

Maggie and I will be watching the Malayalam movie Empuraan tomorrow. The tickets are booked. The movie has created a lot of controversy in Kerala and the director has decided to impose no less than 17 censors on it himself. I want to watch it before the jingoistic scissors find its way to the movie. It is surprising that the people of Kerala took such exception to this movie when the same people had no problem with the utterly malicious and mendacious movie The Kerala Story (2023). [My post on that movie, which I didn’t watch, is here .] Empuraan is based partly on the Gujarat riots of 2002. The riots were real and the BJP’s role in it (Mr Modi’s, in fact) is well-known. So, Empuraan isn’t giving the audience any falsehood as The Kerala Story did. Moreover, The Kerala Story maligned the people of Kerala while Empuraan is about something that happened in the faraway Gujarat quite long ago. Why are the people of Kerala then upset with Empuraan ? Because it tells the truth, M...
13 comments
Read more

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...
9 comments
Read more